Therapies that are based on autonomic modulation have shown efficacy in a variety of diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, in both preclinical and clinical studies. The autonomic balance can be modulated to have more parasympathetic tone by stimulating nerve traffic in parasympathetic targets or inhibiting nerve traffic in sympathetic targets, and can be modulated to have more sympathetic tone by stimulating nerve traffic in sympathetic targets or inhibiting nerve traffic in parasympathetic targets.
Sympathetic overactivation is involved in a variety of cardiovascular disease, such as ventricular arrhythmias, myocardial infarction (MI), heart failure (HF), etc. For example, vagus nerve stimulation, which generally increases parasympathetic tone, has been proposed as a therapy for cardiovascular problems such as cardiac rhythm management, myocardial infarction and ischemia, heart failure (HF), hypertension, and sleep disordered breathing. Further, by way of example, vagal stimulation also has been proposed as a therapy for epilepsy, depression, pain, migraines, eating disorders/obesity, and movement disorders. Stimulation of other neural targets has been proposed. For example, stimulation of baroreceptor regions or the carotid sinus nerve has been proposed to treat hypertension, deep brain stimulation has been proposed to treat depression and dementia, and spinal cord stimulation has been proposed to treat pain.